Fright Night: 9 of the Best Recent Horror Movies You May Have Missed

These underrated horror flicks still haunt our nightmares.

We all love a great gory horror flick, but sometimes it’s the movies that don’t fit into the straightforward square-peg genre that wiggle their way under your skin and stick with you for days, months, even years. In the particular case of this list, these somewhat unnoticed horror movies have stuck with us in the last decade.

These nine movies might not be your typical fright fest fare, but they’re certainly guaranteed to make you think: Did I lock the door? After you finish checking for any ghouls or unwanted visitors in your home, definitely sit down, grab a friend, and watch some of these gory gems from the early 2010s that we're still recovering from in 2019.

Berberian Sound Studio

2012

Photo Credit: Artificial Eye

Fans of behind-the-scenes horror, in particular, the Italian giallo thriller-horror flicks of the 1970s, will love this quirky film. This peculiar movie tells the story Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a British sound engineer who travels to Italy to work on a giallo film. At this new gig, Gilderoy helps provide sounds for gory sequences, and works with screaming voice-over actresses. However, as time goes on, the movie gets bloodier, and the lines between reality and the movie become increasingly blurred. If you love the work of David Lynch, in particular Mulholland Drive, you’ll get a kick out of Berberian Sound Studio.

When their mother dies, sisters Rose (Julia Garner) and Iris (Ambyr Childers) must decide whether or not they want to take on her duties to provide for the family and their unusual lifestyle as cannibals. A remake of a 2010 Mexican film, We Are What We Are has all the gory thrills of your typical gross-out, body horror flick, with the added bonus of actual human emotion. Will Rose and Iris break free from their uber-religious, domineering father, or will they have to continue feasting on the flesh of their victims?

Nowadays, Andy Muschietti is well-known for directing the 2017 adaptation of It and the upcoming sequel, It: Chapter Two, but his 2010 film lingers in the shadows. Based on his 2008 short Spanish-language film Mamá, the film was produced by none other than supernatural horror master, Guillermo del Toro. After the stock market crash of 2008, a stockbroker murders his partners, wife, and attempts to kill his two daughters. But a supernatural force protects the young girls. Five years later, the two girls are discovered by a rescue party, where they make reference to the thing that saved them, calling it, “mama”. At first, their rescuers assume that Mama is a figment of the girls’ imagination—but it becomes very clear that Mama is anything but.

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Stoker

2013

Photo Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

The gorgeous and unsettling English-language debut from Korean director Park Chan-wook shows us that something is not quite right in the house of Stoker. When young India’s (Mia Wasikowska) father is killed in a car accident, her estranged uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up on the scene, bewitching both India and her mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). But it becomes achingly obvious that India and Charlie share more than just a family bond. There’s an impulse for violence in India that she’s never understood, and perhaps Charlie can teach her the ropes.

Though a father freely admits to sexually abusing his daughter, he tells detectives that he has no recollection of the event, prompting an investigation. The detective on the case brings in a psychologist to see if they can unlock any of his repressed memories. But when the young woman claims she’s been the victim of a Satanic cult, the truth only gets more elusive, especially when the detective on the case starts experiencing repressed memories of his own.

Joel Edgerton made his screenwriting and directorial debut in 2015 with this thriller about a childhood friend that comes back to haunt a man and his wife. When Gordo (Joel Edgerton) resurfaces in Simon’s (Jason Bateman) life, his wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) initially thinks nothing of it. But what does Gordo want, and why won’t he leave Simon and Robyn alone? Edgerton’s inspirations for the film include the movies Shadow of a Doubt, Fatal Attraction, and Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy—just to name a few. With a list of movies like that, this film definitely won't disappoint.

This period piece from director Robert Eggers was a smash hit at the Sundance Film Festival, but had a curiously tepid response from audiences. When Thomasin’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) family is banished from their Puritan colony due to the unholy actions of her father, they find themselves in a remote cabin on the outskirts of a large wood. Soon after arriving, Thomasin’s baby brother is snatched away by some unseen force, and her parents are convinced there’s some kind of witchcraft afoot. Beautifully shot, The Witch is a thinking-person’s flick that asks tough questions about good and evil.

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We Are Still Here

2015

Photo Credit: Dark Sky Films

Following the death of their beloved son in a car accident, Anne (Barbara Crampton) and Paul (Andrew Sensenig) move to a fixer-upper in a quaint New England town. Despite the fact that their neighbors warn them to leave the house, which was once used as a funeral home, Anne seems comforted by the idea that the spirit of her dead son is watching over her. After an excursion into town with their friends May and Jacob goes wrong, the four friends begin to suspect that there may be something dark at work in their new house. With iconic scream queen Crampton starring, you can't go wrong.

Though nothing can replace Rosemary’s Baby as the ultimate horror film about impending motherhood and commentary over the control of women’s bodies, The House of Pine Street is a nice homage. Funded via Kickstarter, the movie follows a young pregnant woman named Jennifer (Emily Goss), who moves back home to Kansas after a nervous breakdown. Once she settles into her new home, strange things start happening. Is it just Jennifer’s anxieties over her unwanted pregnancy and her strained relationship with her husband? Or is the house on Pine Street truly haunted?